Do we really need a middle-aged white guy to be the voice of an African American woman? I can’t wrap my head around what stance BoingBoing editors take on issues like this, is it dependent on the wind? Or is it okay because Chris is a friend?

It sounds interesting, and IMO there is a lot here to think about. My problem with most “male gaze” theory is that I encounter it being used as sound-bites, more sort of rhetorical blocks and bludgeons than starting points for meaningful discussion. Like most things discussed in popular media, it quickly leads to subsequent questions (very good) which hardly anybody engages with (rather unfortunate).

“I distinctly remember being told by my teachers, if you draw women, you’re colonizing them with your eyes,”
“Do you not draw women and then maintain an allegiance to some sort of experience that only you have had? Or do you try to expand your understanding and your empathy for other human beings?”

Is everybody colonizing these people with their eyes, or only Ware? How do you know whether or not the people you are drawing are women? How is this exclusive sort of experience any different than anything else in art which is meant to be representational? Does Ware also colonize men, squid, toasters, emotional states? How or why do “human beings” deserve some special status?

FWIW these are questions I have confronted in my own work (music and video) and further encouraged me to avoid representation and egoistic personal expression (in favor of mathematics and abstraction). But I still see it play out in the culture at large.

Reminders about colonialism and people’s often utilitarian interactions are definitely worth getting people to consider. I am interested in what, in-depth, his teacher was getting at. But instead I am guessing it comes down to more controversy of a consensus of whether “this is important” versus “this is whining” rather than ever getting into how such processes work on a functional level.

I wonder too… In my experience of art school, some things are said to students in an effort to put them on a “corrective course,” to suggest to them that the world of media that you’ve ingested up to that point (I’m assuming a 20-something student) has been fraught with… unfortunate cultural baggage. It’s totally legitimate to question whether it’s great for ladies in art/comics to mostly be drawn by men, etc. The problem comes when it seems like its a blanket prohibition: never do this or never do that. In that case, teachers are using a shorthand that is really damaging to young minds, when nuance would be more appropriate. (I also think there is a lot of unfortunate dogma in art school, and it could have just been that)

Though it is not nearly in the same league of controversy, I remember undergrad painting teachers saying, “never use black paint.” This is meant with the best intentions: as a beginner, it can be a challenging pigment since it tends to muddy all your colors, but people in my painting classes would take this to heart and literally never use black again. When I got to gradschool, the record was set straight: yes, you can use black paint, it’s just another color. Haha, I don’t know if this anecdote is helpful at all.

What the heck is “colonizing them with your eyes” supposed to mean? I can imagine there are a bunch of ways of interpreting that, many of which could be completely counter to what the teacher said. I think it means you put your own interpretation into the art you’re creating, which seems to be one of the least surprising thing ever said about art and artists. But correct me if I’m wrong.

Because it was thirty years ago, delivered to a twenty-year old, and sounds like a ridiculous oversimplified caricature of an idea that is actually not totally insane if you are able to think about it with half an ounce of nuance instead of knee-jerk reaction? (Also because it’s clearly a bait-y headline of the “lets get feminist outrage clicks” variety?)

Like believe it or not, there’s nothing in the statement “if you draw women, you’re colonizing them with your eyes” that says “never, ever draw a woman or you are evil,” which seems to be what everyone is reacting to because this is ground zero for male freeze peach nerdrage. But the male gaze is a real thing, male (and white) author/artists receiving accolades for their graphic interpretations of female (and non-white) stories while actual female (and non-white) creators struggle to have their artistic voices heard is a real thing, and if you can’t deal with “hey maybe consider the position of societal power you have over people who are the subject of your artwork and how that affects said artwork” then maybe you’re a shitty artist. But I grant that I wouldn’t have been able to suss that out during undergrad, so I’m accepting that the message didn’t get through at that time (if ever) and is now remembered as a single shocking sentence in isolation–misremembered or misinterpreted.

The bit about “never using black” is a helpful. I am not sure either of us actually do blogs right. We are supposed to be indignant about something all the time. I am told that and kittens is what keeps the lights on. But thanks, anyhow.

In fact, I think Chris Ware has done what he set out to do. His drawings are the exact opposite of superhero strips with absurdly bulging people in central positions. Instead, he seems to place exactly the same emphasis on people, plants, animals, and things. This reminds me of Hergé (though the style is very different). Even camera images rarely have that impersonal, flat quality (that sounds a bit rude, but it is a good thing for me). If he can do that, he can draw what he likes.